Salvador Dali was half-artist, half-imp, and all lunatic. Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories of dream interpretations and the subconscious, Dali sought to depict not visible objects but their associated images and subconscious meanings. For Dali, the life of the mind was life itself, and

Biomorphic, Death, Distorted, Dreamy, Excessive, Grotesque, Hallucinatory, Surrealist art, Surrealist literature, Surrealist poetry

A child of Modernism, Ettore Sottsass elevated the structures of design to new intellectual and philosophical levels. After receiving an architectural degree from the Polytechnic in Turin, Sottsass opened his own design studio, where he dabbled in furniture, sculptural projects, and the fine and appl

Excessive, Geometric, Hi-tech, Layered, Pop/surrealism/anti-design, Round

A visionary, revitalizing force in the New German Cinema of the 1970s, Werner Herzog articulated the dreams of the human spirit. In contrast to his contemporaries, who focused on frenzied, high-tech effects and chaotic jump cuts, Herzog used a lyrical film language to depict quiet spaces of epic unfo

Dystopic, Epic, Excessive, New german cinema, Pioneering, Political, Rebel, Tribal

With an unerring ability both to describe evil and to place himself in its path, Polanski has created a body of work that never fails to elicit shudders and raise questions. He possesses a mordant insight into the politics of sex and violence, an inherent feel for the macabre, and an eccentric and

Erotic, Excessive, Homoerotic, Perverse, Polish new wave, Psychological